“Wall Street analysts who track those who supply the parts for Apple’s phones and tablets are taking a hard look at those numbers, and they don’t like what they see,” Rachelle Dragani reports for MacNewsWorld. “All that fueled the latest round of negative news that included stock price drops [and] analyst downgrades.”
“Jefferies on Tuesday became the latest Wall Street firm to downgrade its Apple price target as it blamed a delay with an iPhone product launch and slower smartphone sales,” Dragani reports. “Misek said in a research note that the company had been planning to launch an “iPhone 5S” in June, but supplier troubles with casing colors were causing a delay in operations. Instead, he predicted Apple will launch a new smartphone in late summer or early fall — about a year after the iPhone 5’s debut.”
Dragani reports, “volatility and recent analyst downgrades aren’t indications that serious trouble is afoot in Cupertino, said Trip Chowdhry, senior analyst for Global Equities Research. ‘Apple is still a company that other companies look to and want to be,’ he told MacNewsWorld. ‘”But investors are uncertain about what the company is going to do next, and the market is getting really competitive. Apple hasn’t made any big moves lately and the supply chain and the stock is going to reflect that.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Analysts who are interested in actually analyzing companies vs. fomenting low-information investor sentiment against them, should buy themselves several boxes of Q-Tips, clean out their ears, and listen – for a change – to what Apple’s management tells them:
I know there has been lots of rumors about order cuts and so forth and so let me just take a moment to make a comment on these. I don’t want to comment on any particular rumor because I would spend my life doing that but I would suggest it’s good to question the accuracy of any kind of rumor about build plans and also stress that even if a particular data point were factual it would be impossible to accurately interpret the data point as to what it meant for our overall business because the supply chain is very complex and we obviously have multiple sources for things, yields might vary, supply performance can vary. The beginning inventory positions can vary, I mean there is just an inordinate long list of things that would make any single data point not a great proxy for what’s going on. – Apple CEO Tim Cook, Q113 conference call with analysts, January 23, 2013
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Malfunction. Need input… More input, Stephanie! – Number 5
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